Transforming Education (TransformEd) is a leading national organization that works with schools and systems to develop and assess students’Mindsets, Essential Skills, and Habits(MESH). In order to help equip students with these social-emotional competencies (that research shows matters to success in college, career, and life), TransformEd created a set of toolkits for introducing MESH topics in schools. Panorama is proud announce that school leaders and teachers can now access TransformEd’s MESH toolkits on Playbook, Panorama’s professional learning community.

Today, schools and districts are making social-emotional development a priority, and with good reason. Research shows that educators play a profound role in promoting students’ social-emotional skills and beliefs.

But what if students have greater confidence that they can improve than their teachers? That’s one of the surprises we found in our recent survey of more than 2,400 teachers and 36,000 students.

Launched this year, the award aims to “stimulate the development and adoption of social-emotional assessments that support effective instruction and positive student development.” A panel of judges from school districts, education nonprofits, and research institutions—including those from Stanford University, the CORE Districts, Washoe County School District, Oakland Unified School District, and the University of Michigan—selected the winning social-emotional learning assessment designs.

Each year, nearly 20,000 elementary and middle schools use the Second Step program to help students understand and manage their emotions and social relationships. With Second Step, students develop social-emotional skills through weekly lessons that involve stories, games, writing and drawing, and other interactive activities.

Now, teachers can explore classroom activities and strategies from Second Step on Playbook, Panorama’s professional learning community for teachers. The classroom activities written by Second Step available on Playbook align with Panorama’s measures of social-emotional learning, including social awareness, emotion regulation, self-efficacy, and grit.

As schools collect feedback from their students, families, and teachers, we hear over and over from educators that some of the most important, actionable information comes from free response comments—and that educators want to hear more from their community. Yet knowing the right questions to ask and sorting through thousands of lines of text can be overwhelming.

About a year ago, we embarked on a journey to rethink free response questions on our surveys. Could we find a way to deliver actionable insights through well-designed questions and best-in-class text analytics?

Today, we’re excited to share the fruits of that project—free response questions that help collect the most relevant feedback from stakeholders, and a new Panorama analytics tool that automatically analyzes free response data in your school or district, visualizes the key themes, and highlights the most important responses for educators.

When we founded Panorama 5 years ago, we wanted to help schools use feedback from students, families, and teachers to build stronger schools. Today, Panorama serves over 5 million students in 7,000 schools in 40 states nationwide. These schools have relied on Panorama’s surveys and analytics as central tools for understanding student needs and progress across climate and culture, family engagement, and social-emotional learning.

Today we’re excited to introduce Panorama Student Success, a new platform that provides educators a complete picture of how every student is doing across academics, attendance, behavior, and social-emotional learning. With Panorama Student Success, educators can identify interventions and target supports to help every student thrive.